Now, another player — Nuggets shooting guard Gary Harris — quietly appears to be on a similar trajectory. From afar, nothing Harris does seems truly spectacular. But zoom in just a little, watch a handful of Denver’s games, and you’ll see elements of Harris’s consistent, well-rounded skill set start to stand out. Just the way Leonard’s once did.

“When I got here, there were questions about whether Gary Harris was an NBA player,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone told me, a reference to Harris’s rookie season, in which he shot just over 30 percent from the field.
The thought seems comical now, as Harris is serving as both Denver’s best on-ball defender and its leading scorer.

For a while, Harris was far stronger on the defensive side of the ball, where it’s harder for the average fan to notice excellence. A solid scorer, by contrast, handles the ball more and gets his name called while the camera pans to his face every time he finds the bottom of the basket. Forcing a missed shot or denying your man the ball on the other end, however, usually isn’t enough to garner that same attention. So that may partially explain why the 23-year-old Harris flies under the radar.

It’s incredibly difficult to draw the types of defensive assignments that Harris typically gets without committing a lot of fouls. But just like Leonard did in his fourth season, Harris has collected more steals than fouls so far this year, a feat that only elite defensive shooting guards and small forwards generally manage.

Harris could be named an All-NBA defender in the coming years without changing much about his game. But to achieve true stardom, he will likely need two things: More scoring — he’s still pretty limited in creating looks for himself — and more wins for the Nuggets.

“If we make the playoffs, a lot more people are going to see and know who the hell Gary Harris is,” said Malone, whose team is locked in a crowded playoff race. “It’s funny: Last year, Nikola Jokic wasn’t going to be a part of All-Star Weekend. Then he puts up 40 points at Madison Square Garden and gets a phone call from the NBA the very next day. ‘Hey, we want you to be part of All-Star Weekend!’ So, we know Nikola and how special he is. And I think the same is true of Gary.”

Perhaps even more important: The two men play with an unusually quiet, workmanlike approach, and they are among the most consistent players in the NBA on a night-to-night basis. “He just puts his head down and goes about his business. He doesn’t talk about it much — he just goes out and does it, and we’re fine with that,” says Denver guard Will Barton, whose locker is next to Harris’s. (Harris’s noticeably quiet disposition, along with the Nuggets’ struggles to really break through on TV with local fans,
undoubtedly contributes to why Harris isn’t better known around the league yet.)

In Harris’s case, one could argue that his consistency on both ends has him on the cusp of joining the elite. Using effective field-goal percentage, a stat that accounts for 3-pointers by looking at the number of points generated per field-goal attempt rather than just shots made per attempt, the chart below illustrates how often the league’s starting shooting guards and small forwards have good shooting nights compared to bad ones. Unsurprisingly, Kevin Durant and LeBron James are at the very top of that list. Leonard rates fifth. And right behind him is Harris at No. 6.

Malone said Harris has been diligent every summer about taking direction from coaches and staff each offseason to continue improving. But Harris told me it was simpler than that for him. “Really, I just want go out there to play and have fun,” he said. “It’s not about me going out and saying, ‘I’ve got to go out and be better than I was last year.’ If you put in the work, it’s going to show itself.”

And if Harris continues to improve and show his work to this extent, it may be only a matter of time until just about every basketball fan knows who he is.

Through Monday night’s games, Harris was logging a ridiculous 64.3 effective field-goal percentage off Jokic’s passes, according Second Spectrum and NBA Advanced Stats — a rate that’s on par with the most efficient scorers in the NBA. Similarly, Jokic posts a 62.1 effective field-goal rate off Harris’s passes, a figure that narrowly outpaces that Stephen Curry’s overall rate.

Through Monday night’s games, Harris was logging a ridiculous 64.3 effective field-goal percentage off Jokic’s passes, according Second Spectrum and NBA Advanced Stats — a rate that’s on par with the most efficient scorers in the NBA. Similarly, Jokic posts a 62.1 effective field-goal rate off Harris’s passes, a figure that narrowly outpaces that Stephen Curry’s overall rate.

Through Monday night’s games, Harris was logging a ridiculous 64.3 effective field-goal percentage off Jokic’s passes, according Second Spectrum and NBA Advanced Stats — a rate that’s on par with the most efficient scorers in the NBA. Similarly, Jokic posts a 62.1 effective field-goal rate off Harris’s passes, a figure that narrowly outpaces that Stephen Curry’s overall rate.

Harris’s fourth year is still ongoing

During the ride to the arena in Denver, my Uber driver, a self-described huge NBA fan, admitted he didn’t know who Harris was.

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